CNN’s senior legal analyst Elie Honig said Tuesday that former President Donald Trump’s motion to have the judge overseeing his Jan. 6 case recused isn’t “outrageous” given some of the judge’s previous statements.
Trump’s attorneys filed a motion arguing Judge Tanya Chutkan should recuse herself over previous comments she made about Trump when sentencing defendants who were involved in the Jan. 6 riot.
Honig acknowledged the recusal motion is a long shot but said Trump’s thought process isn’t abnormal.
“This is an extreme long shot, legally speaking,” Honig said. “But you can see where Donald Trump’s coming from. It’s not an outrageous motion when you see various statements that Judge Chutkan has made in the course of handling the prosecutions and sentencing of other January 6 rioters.” (RELATED: ‘Nothing To Do With The Law’: Election Lawyer Georgia Jury Recommended Charging Slams Process)
“She has said things that seem to pretty clearly suggest that she believed years ago Donald Trump should have been charged, should have been held accountable and she was essentially making the point at this sentencing that, yes, you’re being prosecuted, rightly so, for storming the Capitol, but more responsible people are not.”
WATCH:
“The problem, however, with Donald Trump’s argument legally is that A: it’s really hard to get a judge to recuse himself or herself and B: you can’t base a recusal motion for the most part on something that a judge said during a court proceeding, basically because that’s a judge’s job. They have to take all the evidence in front of them, make decisions, make determinations sometimes about the relative culpability of other people. And so the Supreme Court has basically said if you’re trying to recuse the judge, you have to do it based on something outside of whatever she said in the scope of an actual case in court.”
Trump’s lawyers quoted a portion of the sentencing transcript for a case involving Jan. 6 defendant Christine Priola in which Chutkan said the rioters “were there in fealty, in loyalty, to one man…it’s a blind loyalty to one person, who, by the way, remains free to this day.”
Trump’s lawyers argue the statement meant that “President Trump is free, but should not be.”
Chutkan told another defendant in 2021 that “people who exhorted you and encouraged you and rallied you to go and take action and to fight have not been charged.”
Trump was charged on four counts relating to his alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election in August. Chutkan has set the trial date for March 4, 2024, the day before Super Tuesday.